“For myself, I want no advantage over my fellow man, and if he is weaker than I, all the more is it my duty to help him.” —Eugene V. Debs

Monday, July 18, 2011

Failfandom 101 cheat sheet

Failfans have difficulty reading and leap to odd conclusions. Some say I'm prejudiced against upper and middle class people or against people who went to expensive private schools. I'm not. Many of my favorite thinkers, like Marx and Engels and Martin Luther King, were middle-class. Though I graduated from an inner-city public school that was about 90% black, I've attended expensive private schools and met people there who I still love.

But failfans tend to come from schools of privilege, which may be why their concept of privilege focuses on race and gender, not class.

what is a failfan?

A failfan is a fan of whatever failfans decide is a fail. Examples: Racefail 09, Mammothfail, Moonfail, Fishboobfail, etc. Their favorite tactics include censorship and blacklisting.

boosted the signal to out Rachel Moss. "What I really want is for someone to find the real names behind some of these people and post that somewhere." "if Rachel Moss feels scared, hurt, embattled, and like she can’t walk down the street without someone having something nasty to say about her, all I can say is: good. She deserves it."

ETA: Does this list need more prominent failfans? james_nicoll seems to be feeling neglected, but I think that's his white privilege talking; he's been a follower, not a leader, so far as I have noticed. yeloson and sinboy could be added if the list needs men, but in most of these fails, women tend to lead because the fails come from neoliberal feminist circles. rydra_wong and Ann Somerville might be included, since they've been diligent recorders of fail, boldly banning alternative interpretations from their accounts, but they've added little or nothing to fail discussions that seems original.